Procrastination and Perfectionism Equals Stuck

Holy Cow! I never expected to uncover what I found on my way to researching the topic of perfectionism. It absolutely turned my morning upside down. I was all set to write up a tidy little summary of everything you might want to know about the trait of perfectionism. As I dug in, I bumped into one article that just blew the door wide open on my own lingering perfectionism issue.

As I said, my goal here was to briefly cover some of the ins and outs of perfectionism. At first, when I mentioned I was going to be writing on this, I believed all perfectionism is undesirable. First realization-it is not all crippling or even undesirable. This will be covered in Part 2 of what has now turned into a two part post on this subject.

A ‘recovering perfectionist’ is how I describe myself when the topic comes up. You see, in my career of redesigning custom furniture for clients, I would wake up in the middle of the night before delivering a custom piece and convince myself that either a portion of, or the entire piece had to be redone; I had made a huge mistake, put the fabric on upside down, or attached the outside back at a slight slant. I absolutely drove myself bonkers with that distorted thinking.  It took a bit to realize I had to shed this tendency, which falls under the perfectionism subcategory of self oriented perfectionism-easy on others, hard on myself.

Up until this morning, I thought I had conquered all of my perfectionism tendencies. That was until I read about the destructive duo of procrastination and perfectionism. It was an aha! moment, to say the least. The article finishes with this lightening bolt of a last paragraph about perfectionist procrastinators. I had been spotted!

‘As a perfectionist procrastinator, you likely have a lot of anxiety about doing projects. You’ve set the bar too high to reach your goals. So you probably know deep down that doing a project to your impossible standards will be exhausting. And you’re probably anxious that whatever you do won’t be good enough, or that you’ll fail somehow. And because perfectionism is fueled by anxiety, you start to procrastinate so you can avoid the discomfort of anxiety. After all, if you never start something, you can’t fail at it.’

~Carinocounseling.com

No joke, this paragraph could have been based on my own personal years-long saga of not reaching the big goals I set for myself. Procrastinating so I can avoid the discomfort of anxiety! Do you hear that? This revelation hit a very sensitive nerve in my psyche. All of the self criticism, regret, and guilt I carry around for not following through, not reaching my big goals, not moving forward on my big plans–here it is in a nutshell and the load is heavy.

Avoiding the anxiety of failure AND success has been a hidden MO of mine for as long as I can remember, although I’ve managed to follow through on some big goals along the way.  The fear of not measuring up, or of measuring up at first, but not being able to sustain at that level. Somewhere, deep down, I knew this was a key factor of my ‘stuckness’. But I didn’t yet understand that I’ve been moving this giant glob of stuckness all over the place instead of just tossing it. I didn’t see it for what it was. It hasn’t served me well at all. Have you ever had such a quick and penetrating truth come to light? That nasty little habitual pattern has been spotted and identified.

It’s going to take me a few days to process this, accept it, and find ways to spot it in my thinking.  Since I’ve seen it, I now know it’s not a faulty me, it’s a faulty belief. Letting go of this, or at least working on letting go of it, already makes me feel lighter and freer to get on with my plans. Without spending undue time on tracing this unhelpful habit back to wherever, I’m ok with finally understanding  that I used it to indirectly avoid the anxiety I experience IMAGINING what others might think of my work. Being the youngest of five kids, all of them very sharp and quick, it’s not a big quandary how I developed a belief I might not measure up. But that’s old news. I’m moving forward.

I’m going to put it to the test right this minute by taking one more photo for this post, and then move right on to finishing up the 2nd part of this article,  EVEN IF IT’S NOT PERFECT!

Hang in here with me as I work through and come out the other side to see if the unquenchable  quest for perfection and it’s procrastination sidekick can be transmuted into appreciating the process with joy and satisfaction in a job done well enough.

Phew! Talk about being vulnerable!

Next up: Embrace Imperfection